Can hemp be "improved" over time so that is qualifies as marijuana?

According to what I've read, hemp is the same exact plant as marijuana -except that hemp has 0.3% THC or less -and anything above that level is technically marijuana.

Which brings me to the question of "Is it possible to buy legal hemp seed and then grow it under supreme conditions and breed it with other hemp so that eventually the THC levels would exceed that of hemp?" And if it is possible then would it become an arrest-able offense for growing weed even though you bought it as legal hemp seed?

It seems like THC levels across the board have skyrocketed in only a few years. I guess the point is that it sure doesn't seem like it takes that long to go from a market where growers strived to get to the 20% THC level to now where everything is in the 30% range.

How long would it take to go from 0.3% THC hemp to 10-12% THC I wonder?

tstick said:

According to what I've read, hemp is the same exact plant as marijuana -except that hemp has 0.3% THC or less -and anything above that level is technically marijuana.

Which brings me to the question of "Is it possible to buy legal hemp seed and then grow it under supreme conditions and breed it with other hemp so that eventually the THC levels would exceed that of hemp?" And if it is possible then would it become an arrest-able offense for growing weed even though you bought it as legal hemp seed?

It seems like THC levels across the board have skyrocketed in only a few years. I guess the point is that it sure doesn't seem like it takes that long to go from a market where growers strived to get to the 20% THC level to now where everything is in the 30% range.

How long would it take to go from 0.3% THC hemp to 10-12% THC I wonder?

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Why not just buy weed seeds?

tstick said:

According to what I've read, hemp is the same exact plant as marijuana -except that hemp has 0.3% THC or less -and anything above that level is technically marijuana.

Which brings me to the question of "Is it possible to buy legal hemp seed and then grow it under supreme conditions and breed it with other hemp so that eventually the THC levels would exceed that of hemp?" And if it is possible then would it become an arrest-able offense for growing weed even though you bought it as legal hemp seed?

It seems like THC levels across the board have skyrocketed in only a few years. I guess the point is that it sure doesn't seem like it takes that long to go from a market where growers strived to get to the 20% THC level to now where everything is in the 30% range.

How long would it take to go from 0.3% THC hemp to 10-12% THC I wonder?

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Pot seeds are legal so your idea doesn't make much sense, making your question irrelevant. You said yourself that what makes hemp legal is percentage of thc. Above the 0.3% of thc percentage and it's pot. That's exactly how hemp is regulated. If, through testing, it looks like a farmer's hemp crop is going to go above 0.3% the farmer must harvest early. Hemp is not regulation-free.

Certainly you could breed the THC back into it, but it would be a long process and could take many years, breeding hemp to hemp would accomplish nothing, you'd have to cross it with a higher THC producing plant, then years of back crossing to get the desired THC content and stabilize the strain. For centuries hemp has been bred for fibers, not THC, the orignal plants did have higher %'s of THC (probably in the 2-5% range) than hemp does now. Remember that the term "hemp" is an artificial designation. Think of hemp as a cultivar or strain of Cannabis Sativa.

Thanks for the responses. Yes, I just buy real seeds. It was just something I was thinking about.

When I was young back in the 70's I lived in an area where wild hemp grew in the drainage ditches alongside the country roads. Back, then it wasn't legal to even grow hemp...It was just something that grew wild. But if you were caught with it, it was the same charge against you as it would be for real weed. And back in those days, real weed wasn't really high level THC stuff, either.

So, in theory and just for the sake of fun discussion, IF you bred hemp and then selected plants from the offspring that displayed more trichome production, etc. -more weed-like qualities, until eventually you ended up with a a decent plant, it would have been something that would make an interesting experiment...like how many generations would it take? and so on.

tstick said:

Thanks for the responses. Yes, I just buy real seeds. It was just something I was thinking about.

When I was young back in the 70's I lived in an area where wild hemp grew in the drainage ditches alongside the country roads. Back, then it wasn't legal to even grow hemp...It was just something that grew wild. But if you were caught with it, it was the same charge against you as it would be for real weed. And back in those days, real weed wasn't really high level THC stuff, either.

So, in theory and just for the sake of fun discussion, IF you bred hemp and then selected plants from the offspring that displayed more trichome production, etc. -more weed-like qualities, until eventually you ended up with a a decent plant, it would have been something that would make an interesting experiment...like how many generations would it take? and so on.

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Unlikely you'd breed anything of significant thc % if you're starting with 100% "hemp" plants.

I.e. a 0.4% plant and a 0.6% don't add up to a 1.0% plant gentically. It doesn't work that way. You'd have to introduce plants with a much higher thc % somewhere along the way. Sure theoretically you could keep selecting away from the low thc plants, and maybe many years and many many generations down the line you get some mutant outliers with a higher %, but that's not really a plan worth anyone's time.

For giggles it would be interesting, but it could take decades trying to build back up the THC content by breeding hemp to hemp. Totally unecessary, as we already have high quality seeds.

I don't think you can do it with a single plant.

I could be totally wrong here, but I vaguely recall hearing about alot of European weed losing its prestige over time due to inbreeding/back-crossing the same plant over and over again. Genetic diversity isn't as important to plants as animals, but it is nessessary.

Again, I could be totally wrong here, so don't take my word for it.

Lets say money, weather, space, and plant count arent factors. If you start with 4 hemp plants, and you could analyze every plant for cannibanoid percentages, I bet you would have mids in 7 years or less with year round breeding projects.

Right...not just one plant...but say, just for fun and giggles, you throw a bucket full of hemp seeds down in a field and at harvest time, you walk through the field and you see this one plant that looks twice as full and dense as any other plant in the field -a mutant, let's call it. And then a little further into the field, you find a plant that's real scrawny...but it's just covered with sticky trichomes and has a really interesting smell compared to anything else in the field.

So you breed those two plants together and you get another bucket of seeds at harvest time and then you grow them out and this time, you see there are a couple plants that display both the traits of the previous year's select plants...both are larger sized and one is covered with trichomes...And you repeat this process until you start to get to what isn't hemp anymore, but is, in fact, some pretty acceptable weed.

Another reasons "Why?" might be to try and get to some of the old landrace strain qualities to come back -sure, maybe low THC, but new and interesting flavors....maybe even a skunk cultivar. Would that be possible, I wonder? Are there unique SMELLING hemp varieties or, does it all smell like hay?

Again, the weed back in the 70's wasn't very high THC at all as a general rule, anyway. In fact, I wonder if some of what we got back then was just straight up hemp!

It's possible but I bet it would take a while.

People have been selectively breeding cannabis for higher THC content for hundreds or thousands of years, ever since someone figured out that if they burned a pile of "hemp" cannabis plants, they would get a little "high" from the smoke. So they started cultivating hemp for that purpose, and eventually they ran across a few plants that were genetic outliers and had more THC than the rest, like 0.5 or 1%. Those plants got them more high than the others, so they used them for breeding, and continuously grew out the seeds from plants that got them the most high, not really knowing what chemical was in the weed that was getting them high, just that plants x, y, and z had it and plants a, b, and c did not.

Fast forward through several hundred iterations of that selection process, and now you have plants that are technically the same species, but much higher THC content. It's like breeding dogs, how you can select for certain traits and eventually get a pug from what was originally a wolf...

I guess with modern genetic and chemical testing, we could get there faster or more efficiently, but I bet it would still take dozens if not hundreds of generations of breeding to go from 0.3% "hemp" to 12% "marijuana"...

Here in Michigan weed isn't worth anything now anyway. Not sure why anyone would waste any time considering this. Once you finally get the thc up your grandkids could work on taste I guess. Or you could do something productive.

My opinion no, why? most lay people who makes seeds can not even maintain the thc levels they started with over a few generations, hence the proliferation of cbd seeds from otherwise thc varieties. Thc levels have not changed since the late 70s. The testing and way of reporting thc levels have changed. The gov has not kept up, as usual they lag behind, they are destroying hemp because the 0.3 percent is no longer correct for hemp, that number needs to be raised with the way the tests are now done and reported. I am of the opinion that hemp is the natural original state not high thc levels, if left on its own it reverts back to hemp in most parts of the world.

there was a guy somewhere on the plains of CO that grew hemp and it ended up being too much thc to legally press it for oil. he was stuck with tons of "too much but not enough" junk.

SmichiganOG said:

Here in Michigan weed isn't worth anything now anyway. Not sure why anyone would waste any time considering this. Once you finally get the thc up your grandkids could work on taste I guess. Or you could do something productive.

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I think it would be interesting as an experiment especially since weed has lost a lot of value in lots of places. Learning something new is productive.

Can't smoke rope, ya dope lol jk

Seriously though. Hemp will at very least always have industrial application, even if you're using THC-weed to do it, which would only be chosen if said cultivar was very fibrous. Seeds, BTW, have no real THC content and should now be shippable as "souvenirs", it's not until they're grown out as drug plants that it becomes a legal issue.

We have the marijuanas we have now through selective breeding. Crossing the crosses of crosses ad nauseam, until natural field cannabis becomes MAC1 and so forth.

Simply put; hemp farmers are looking for fibrous cannabis the same way you're looking for frosty buds.

PopAndSonGrows said:

Can't smoke rope, ya dope lol jk

Seriously though. Hemp will at very least always have industrial application, even if you're using THC-weed to do it, which would only be chosen if said cultivar was very fibrous. Seeds, BTW, have no real THC content and should now be shippable as "souvenirs", it's not until they're grown out as drug plants that it becomes a legal issue.

We have the marijuanas we have now through selective breeding. Crossing the crosses of crosses ad nauseam, until natural field cannabis becomes MAC1 and so forth.

Simply put; hemp farmers are looking for fibrous cannabis the same way you're looking for frosty buds.

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In the US, seeds can be shipped legally.

Phytoplankton said:

In the US, seeds can be shipped legally.

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and illegally everywhere else. Gotta love the postman/women. Post people?

tstick said:

I think it would be interesting as an experiment especially since weed has lost a lot of value in lots of places. Learning something new is productive.

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True. But I have pigs, chickens, pot, other gardening besides weed, and now that the money is out of pot I'm hustling to make a dollar. Not saying I made a lot ever, but as a caregiver it sure helped out. Lol, if you need a hobby go for it but I'm set for now. Now if you want to breed some cbd into some higher thc pot, that might be useful to someone. I just don't see the value in your proposed project. I agree with your statement that learning something new is always productive though.

weedstoner420 said:

It's possible but I bet it would take a while.

People have been selectively breeding cannabis for higher THC content for hundreds or thousands of years, ever since someone figured out that if they burned a pile of "hemp" cannabis plants, they would get a little "high" from the smoke. So they started cultivating hemp for that purpose, and eventually they ran across a few plants that were genetic outliers and had more THC than the rest, like 0.5 or 1%. Those plants got them more high than the others, so they used them for breeding, and continuously grew out the seeds from plants that got them the most high, not really knowing what chemical was in the weed that was getting them high, just that plants x, y, and z had it and plants a, b, and c did not.

Fast forward through several hundred iterations of that selection process, and now you have plants that are technically the same species, but much higher THC content. It's like breeding dogs, how you can select for certain traits and eventually get a pug from what was originally a wolf...

I guess with modern genetic and chemical testing, we could get there faster or more efficiently, but I bet it would still take dozens if not hundreds of generations of breeding to go from 0.3% "hemp" to 12% "marijuana"...

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This 100% your forgetting alot of time and effort put into selection by the people that have gone before us many forget how long that is and how much work and blood sweat and tears has gone into it for god knows how long it doesnt happen in one lifetime thats for sure

If you want to go “ primitive “ i guess … grow Ruderalis Indica.